Hiss Case

ThHISS CASE. In his memoir Six Crises (1962), Richard Nixon wrote that had it not been for the Alger Hiss case, involving espionage charges against the long-time New Dealer, he would never have made it to the White House. He rightly observed, “My name, my reputation, and my career were ever to be linked with the decisions I made and the actions I took in that case, as a thirty-five-year-old freshman Congressman in 1948.”

Nixon wasn’t the only one who became a national figure as a result of the Hiss case. The guilty verdict against Hiss in January 1950 inspired the then junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, to adopt anti-Communism as his issue. It all began for the senator with a speech before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, about Communists in the State Department, nineteen days after Hiss’s conviction. The purges and policies from the so-called McCarthy Era would continue to reverberate in American culture and politics decades after the senator’s death in 1957.

The Hiss case erupted just as the first postwar presidential campaign was getting underway. Beginning in August, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) started a series of hearings intended to embarrass the Democrats around the issue of communism in the government. The hearings featured ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers. Their stories were difficult to disentangle, and between them they named scores of former New Deal officials they claimed to have known, or have known of, as Communists. The testimony of the forty-seven-year-old Chambers would have enormous political repercussions. He stated that from 1924 until 1937 he had been a functionary of the Communist Party (CP). He named Alger Hiss, Hiss’s younger brother Donald (at that time law partner of future Secretary of State Dean Acheson), and six other former New Deal officials as having been part of a secret underground group organized in the 1930s by the CP. Chambers consistently testified that he and the group never engaged in espionage. He said, “I should perhaps make the point that these people were specifically not wanted to act as sources of information.”

With the exception of the Hiss brothers, the individuals named by Chambers were publicly known as left-wing activists. Lee Pressman, John Abt, Nathan Witt, Victor Perlo, and Charles Kramer were officials of the newly formed Progressive Party, and Henry Collins was executive secretary of the American-Russian Institute. All six claimed their Fifth Amendment privilege and refused to testify (Collins, however, answered all questions and denied Chambers’ allegations under oath before a grand jury in December 1948). Donald Hiss appeared before HUAC to deny Chambers’ allegations and to state that the only organizations he had ever belonged to were the Boy Scouts of America and the Maryland Yacht Club.

The most prominent of those named was Alger Hiss, then forty-three years old and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously, Hiss had worked as staff counsel for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and for the Senate’s Nye Committee investigating the munitions industry; this had been followed by service with the State Department, beginning in 1936. Hiss had gone to the “Big Three” Yalta conference in 1945 as an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and had capped his government service by presiding over the founding session of the United Nations as its general secretary.

Hiss appeared before HUAC at his own request and denied categorically the Chambers allegations. He denied having known anyone named Whittaker Chambers, and he testified that he had never been a member or sympathizer of the CP. Shown a newspaper photo of his accuser, a man he was not alleged to have seen in more than a decade, Hiss requested a face-to-face confrontation. Richard M. Nixon, then a freshman Republican representative, volunteered to chair a special subcommittee to follow through on the identification. Truman had already held a 5 August press conference in which he berated the HUAC hearings as a Republican Party election-year ploy and a “red herring” to distract the public’s attention from the “do-nothing” record of the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress.
Using leaks and statements to the press, Nixon quickly managed to make the dispute between Hiss and Chambers, a senior editor of Time, the number-one news story of the day. He did this in part by changing the focus of the investigation from whether Hiss had been a Communist to the more sensational question of whether he was lying when he said he had never known anyone named Whittaker Chambers. The way Nixon framed it was, if Hiss was lying about knowing Chambers he was also covering up his association with the Party.
On 7 August, Chambers was brought in to testify in executive session. The point was to elicit from him details about Hiss’s life that would prove the two had known each other. The Hiss-Chambers contradictions got into court following statements made by Chambers at the end of August on a Meet the Press network radio program. Chambers repeated the charge that he had worked with Hiss in a secret underground CP apparatus that had no espionage function. He said its purpose was to influence policy by getting Communists into key places in government. Unlike his HUAC testimony, these remarks did not enjoy congressional immunity. Hiss filed a $75,000 lawsuit for slander in a federal district court in Baltimore.
That November, pretrial sworn depositions for the libel suit (abandoned after Hiss was charged with perjury) established as a sham every essential element in Chambers’ accusations. Chambers was not even able to offer any proof that he had ever been a CP member, much less a full-time employee. Nor was there any proof offered to back up Chambers’ allegation that Alger Hiss had been one.
At the end of two days of examination by Hiss’s lawyer, Chambers wrote in his autobiography, Witness (1952), that he was so overcome “with despair” he had contemplated killing himself by taking cyanide. Equally depressing for Chambers and for Nixon, HUAC, the Republican Party, Time, and others who had championed and exploited his story was the upset victory of Harry Truman in the November elections. Within days, there was also an indictment on payroll charges of J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of HUAC. Two months later, Thomas was in a federal prison.

On 17 November, after a twelve-day recess in the libel suit depositions, Chambers returned for more questioning. He now told an entirely new tale, that Hiss had not just been a secret Communist, but he had also been a spy. To support his story, he produced sixty-five typewritten sheets, dated from January to April, 1938, that he identified as copies of State Department documents that “I had forgotten I had.” He said they had been given to him by Alger Hiss to be handed over to a Russian agent. He also produced four handwritten chits ripped from a notepad that Chambers called “handwriting samples” of Hiss’s.

At Hiss’s insistence, all of this material was immediately turned over to the Justice Department. The attorney general asked both sides to say nothing for two weeks until the new development was investigated. One thing was now certain: Chambers had committed perjury. Either his HUAC testimony that he and Hiss had been part of a CP network that did not engage in espionage or his new testimony to the contrary must have been false. He had also told a grand jury in October that he had no information that Hiss had committed espionage. This, too, would have had to have been considered perjury if he was now telling the truth.

The next public development was an announcement in December that created more headlines than anything HUAC had ever done in its ten-year history. On the evening of 2 December, Chambers retrieved from a pumpkin patch on his farm in Westminster, Maryland, three rolls and two strips of 35mm of film (thereafter dubbed the “pumpkin papers”). These were described as “secret” State Department material handed over to Chambers by a member of the CP underground. As far as the public could tell, the films verified the spy charges spearheaded by Congressman Nixon and hammered away at by the Republicans in the just-completed presidential campaign.

Months later, the papers were revealed to be a mix of documents (that would have created a stack of perhaps one inch) from the State Department and the Bureau of Standards. Most of the State Department documents hadn’t even been delivered to Hiss’s office, while the Bureau of Standards material dealt with such anodyne topics as care for Navy rafts, life preservers, and the maintenance of fire extinguishers. All the Bureau of Standards documents were available to the general public at the Bureau’s library. On 15 December, after an FBI expert testified before the grand jury that the copies of the State Department papers turned over by Chambers at the pretrial depositions were typed on the same typewriter that was used to type the personal correspondence of Priscilla and Alger Hiss, the grand jury indicted Hiss on perjury charges after he denied being a spy. The Statute of Limitations would have prevented the indictment of Hiss for espionage. The indictment came two days after Nixon himself testified before the panel, in an unusual move, urging them to indict Hiss but not Chambers, who had acknowledged committing perjury before HUAC and a previous grand jury in October.

The first trial lasted seven weeks, from May to July 1949. It ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree on a verdict. A second trial resulted in a guilty verdict. Still claiming his innocence at sentencing, Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. He served forty-four months at the Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania before being released in November 1954. He would spend the remainder of his working career as a salesman in New York City.

Once the second Hiss trial returned a guilty verdict, there was no restraining the freshman congressman who had made these allegations when no evidentiary justification existed. On 26 January 1950, the day after Hiss was sentenced, Nixon delivered a four-hour House speech that he titled “Lessons of the Hiss Case.” The high point of the address was his accusation that in September 1939, Chambers had gone to Washington and presented evidence of espionage to Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, and the government had done nothing. Nixon put it thus: “... concrete information concerning Communist espionage activities in this country was in the hands of both President Roosevelt and President Truman and still no action was taken.” While untrue, this version was accepted without challenge in many quarters

As for Hiss, government documents released a quarter century after his conviction indicated he was telling the truth all along. Passage of the amended Freedom of Information Act in 1974 gave Hiss access to the government’s files on his case. Over the next four years, he received 45,000 pages of documents from the FBI, the Department of Justice in New York, the State Department and other government agencies. The files showed that the FBI had a mole in the Hiss defense; suborned perjury by three witnesses including Whittaker Chambers; and had information indicating that the typewriter the defense presented at trial as their family machine. That is, the typewriter that the prosecution claimed was used to copy the State Department documents could not have been the Hiss’s typewriter because, based on the serial number, it had been manufactured too late to have been the machine that Priscilla’s father purchased in 1927 and later gave to her. The files also indicated that FBI knew that Chambers had left the Communist Party long before the dates of the Baltimore Documents, which meant he could not have collected them from Hiss and given them to the Soviet Union.

As a result of these findings, in 1978 Hiss filed a petition for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis, to overturn the verdict on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. The petition was filed in federal court and was turned down by Judge Richard Owen, appointed to the bench by Nixon in 1982. This ruling was affirmed by the Court of Appeals and not reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The same year that Hiss filed his petition, Random House published “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,” by Allen Weinstein, a history professor at Smith College. It was Weinstein’s stunning thesis that Hiss’s own defense files, to which Hiss had granted free access, indicated that he was lying all along. Weinstein also conducted a number of interviews which, he claimed, supported Chambers’s story. He would not, however, let independent researchers see the notes or recordings of his interviews, even though he promised they would soon be donated to a research library. In the meantime, Victor Navasky, then the editor and publisher of The Nation, interviewed several people whose comments were included in Weinstein’s book. They all said they were misquoted.

Weinstein’s papers were eventually donated to the Hoover Institution but not made public until decades later. When they were, it became clear that he had misquoted or mischaracterized some of his most important interviews. Still, Weinstein’s book had been credited in many circles with settling the question of Hiss’s guilt. In 1998, Random House published a second book by Weinstein, The Haunted Wood, containing secret material credited to a former KGB agent named Alexander Vassiliev, who also served as co-author. The book was based in large part on KGB files housed by its successor group, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, that had been selected and shown to Vassiliev in exchange for a payment by the publisher to an association of retired KGB members. At the trial, Vassiliev was critical of his co-author’s methods, but he lost the suit.

Vassiliev’s notes provided were the basis for yet another book, Spies: The History of the KGB in America (2009), by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. The authors devoted their first chapter, “Alger Hiss: Case Closed,” to their argument that the Vassiliev notes proved Hiss was guilty. At a conference marking the public release of Vassiliev’s notebooks, in Washington DC, several historians raised questions about whether or the not they proved that Hiss was indeed guilty or whether they were simply more of what had been offered in the past. For one thing, the notes were from the KGB files. Hiss was alleged to have worked for military intelligence (the GRU), and the two rival agencies apparently did not share information.

More recently, there has also been considerable evidence released supporting Hiss’s version of events. In 1997, the minutes of the grand jury that indicted Hiss were released. These minutes not only revealed how Chambers’s story had undergone major changes before his trial testimony, but also revealed the names of previously unknown witnesses who would have been of considerable help to the defense, had they testified at trial.

In addition, as a result of his lawsuit against the FBI, the Bureau released some 150,000 pages of unredacted documents on the case, revealing even more malfeasance by the Bureau. The investigative files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities were also released, showing that the committee’s investigation was much less than it appeared. The Hiss family papers were also categorized and made publicly available. Among them were letters between Alger and Priscilla Hiss from 1929 to 1933, the period in which it is alleged that Hiss joined the Communist Party. The letters reveal no such thing. Much of the new information was published in a website devoted specifically to the case, algerhiss.com, begun in 2001, and continually updated.

In 1992, the preeminent Soviet historian, Dmitri A. Volkogonov, stated in a letter to John Lowenthal that he had checked the files of the KGB and found no evidence that Hiss was a spy. When Hiss’s detractors pointed out that Hiss had been alleged to have been a GRU agent, Volkogonov said in an interview with Lowenthal that those files were checked as well and showed no indication that Hiss had been an agent, paid or unpaid. Either way, Volkogonov’s statement, if true, casts doubt on the notes produced by Vassiliev, alleged to be the most valuable recent evidence showing that Hiss was guilty.

Hiss died in 1996, still proclaiming his innocence. Whittaker Chambers died under mysterious circumstances in 1961.

Andrews, Bert, and Peter Andrews. A Tragedy of History. Washington, D.C.: R.B. Luce, 1962.

Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. New York: Random House, 1952.

Cook, Fred J. The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss. New York: William Morrow, 1958.

Hiss, Alger. In the Court of Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.

Hiss, Tony. The View From Alger’s Window. New York: Vintage Press, 2000.

Jowitt, W.A. The Strange Case of Alger Hiss. New York: Doubleday, 1953.

Reuben, William A. The Atom Spy Hoax. New York: Action Books, 1955.

Reuben, William A. The Honorable Mr. Nixon. Rev. ed. New York: Action Books, 1960.

Smith, John Cabot. Alger Hiss: The True Story. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.

Zeligs, Meyer. Friendship and Fratricide. New York: Viking Press, 1967.
www.algerhiss.com – A comprehensive Web site devoted to the case.